How The Golden State Warriors Are Breaking The NBA

Stephen Curry celebrates after a Harrison Barnes 3-pointer against the Chicago Bulls.

Ezra Shaw / Getty Images

The first time I saw my boss, Nate Silver, give a talk was at the 2014 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. As usual, he was going on about numbers and statistics, but what stuck with me longest wasn’t quantitative. Pointing to the practice of relegation in European soccer leagues, he said European sports tend to be more capitalist by nature, while their American counterparts tend to be more socialist.

“It’s kind of ironic,” Silver said. “American sports are socialist.”

That may be true, but Stephen Curry is a pure basketball capitalist.

Nate’s framework was right: With provisions like “salary caps,” “revenue sharing” and drafts that generally allot the best new talent to the worst teams, American leagues intentionally promote parity while suppressing the natural tendency for some clubs to dominate others. But Curry and his teammates are unapologetically destroying Adam Silver’s Bolshevist basketball state. The Golden State Warriors are 15-0. If they win Tuesday against the lowly Los Angeles Lakers, they will break the record for the hottest start in NBA history; no NBA team has won its first 16 games.

How are they doing this?

Well, the Warriors have by far the most efficient offense in the NBA, logging a massive 112 points per 100 possessions. They shoot well above league averages from every spot on the floor, especially in the areas beyond the arc.

It’s as if at some point in the past few years, the Warriors solved contemporary basketball, at least perimeter basketball. They know that 3-pointers are the best way to rack up points on offense, so they developed talent and tactics to master that. But they have also employed defensive principles to prevent their opponents from doing so on the other end.

It used to be that the most valuable guys in the NBA were interior giants who dominated the paint. Now the most valuable player in the NBA is a point guard with the sweetest stroke in the league.

Curry leads the league in scoring, and if he wins a scoring title this season, he will be the most perimeter-oriented player to ever do so. As I wrote last season, he’s transforming the way we see point guards and 3-point shooters in the NBA. That may seem like hyperbole, but it’s not; between Curry’s volume, his efficiency and his quickness, it’s easy to argue that he is the best 3-point shooter the NBA has ever seen.

So far this season, Curry has made 74 threes — the most in the NBA. Damian Lillard ranks second, with 45. To say that Curry is an outlier would be an insult to the word outlier. So far this season, 84 percent of NBA threes have come off assists. But for Curry, that number is just 62 percent, and his ability to get his own deadly looks beyond the arc is arguably his signature weapon as a scorer. For context, only one of Klay Thompson’s 33 threes has been unassisted this season.

Curry is an emblem for his team at large. He’s a young, perimeter-oriented genius who is reforming how we think about dominance in the NBA and making the rest of the league look feckless while doing so. He’s already a champion, but, just like his team, he is still getting better. Curry and the Warriors are just getting started, and what a golden start it’s already been.

CORRECTION (Nov. 24, 12:55 p.m.): A chart in an earlier version of this article incorrectly labeled the Warriors’ defensive proficiency for some shots. A color on the chart suggested the Warriors were at about the average league level in limiting opponents’ scoring from the left elbow and right baseline 3-pointer, but the data showed opponents are shooting above average from those zones.